.SOMETIMES RAW.

Do you have kids? Do you want them to say more than two words at dinner? I have figured out (by reading about and studying linguistics and communication) ways to get a child talking (a lot!) during dinner. Here, I share my five brilliant conversation starters. 

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The whole concept of family dinner, if you think about it, is pretty elemental: you gather around a table in the waning hours, you and yours, and eat, converse about your day and, if you’re lucky, life itself. But sometimes — or, most of the time — our dinners can resemble not so much a family eating in the kitchen of our Dutch colonial but a pre-verbal gathering of primitive hominids on the veldt, hunched over a large rock, devouring the day’s kill with frightening, brutal efficiency — quick, before somebody steals it! — and doing it all through a silence punctured only by occasional lip smacks and grunts of pleasure. In other words, getting dinner on the table often feels like the easy part; it’s the conversing and communicating — the family part of family dinner — that often prove more elusive. And, okay, if you insist on greater specificity, it’s my ability to get my child to SPEAK TO ME that is often very much in doubt.

Does this exchange sound familiar to you?

“What’d you do today?”

“What?”

“What’d you do today?

“Huh?”

“What’d you do today?”

“Mmm, I don’t remember.”

“What’d you do today?”

“I need ketchup.”

Over the past few years, I’ve devised a few techniques to deal with this situation, ways to prod and cajole Joel into sharing and prompting and interacting — or, at the barest minimum, stopping for a moment to look up and acknowledge something beyond the food on his plates…

Mad-Sad-Glad

The most consistently successful of all my methods. Each person at the table has to share one thing from their day that made them mad, one thing that made them sad, and one thing that made them glad. In addition to initiating some real conversation (we rarely make it all the way around the table, once everyone gets going) this has the welcome benefit of clueing you into some things in your kids’ lives — anxieties, accomplishments, mean girls at camp, math difficulties, and the always-telling lunch table politics — that they might otherwise have locked away in a drawer and let fester.

The Negative Assertion

This doesn’t deliver the kind of sustained, substantive conversation you get with Mad Sad Glad, but it often helps break the ice and get some dinnertime energy flowing. Kids love to prove their parents wrong — or, at least, my kid loves to prove me wrong — so I’ll offer up an observation that I know is untrue, and wait for the kids to set the record straight. Like this one, from a beautiful, clear summer evening last year:

Me: “I can’t believe you had to stay inside all day at camp today because of the weather.”

Abby: “No we didn’t!”

Me: “Man, that must have been so boring.”

Phoebe: “We were outside all day! We hiked down to the river, and had lunch under the poison ivy tree, and…”

Other options: Why do you think Mrs. H. decided to skip math lessons today? I can’t believe nobody said a word on the bus on the way home this afternoon. Do you guys ever wonder how an ostrich flies? So a friend tells me you hate playing Playstation now…

Talk About Yourself (And Let Them Jump In)

My own life doesn’t always strike me as riveting, but you’d be surprised at what kids get into. An example: a year or so ago, I was working on an article about moving from Canada to Austria and studying full-time at Carleton University in Ottawa. How hard the winters in Canada were and such things. My son couldn’t get enough! He still asks me from time to time on how life was in Canada when he was still so small. The snowstorms and the Powwow Festivals. Seriously. Possible moral of story: we’re not as boring as we think we are?

The Misdirection Play

I hardly ever get an answer when I ask my kid something directly. (“What did you do at school today?”) Similar to the Negative Assertion approach, I find it helps to take the pressure off a little by asking to tell a story about someone else. But maybe don’t phrase it quite so overtly. Phrase it like this: “So [your kid’s name here], tell me about this new friend of yours, [new friend name here]. Does she have long hair? Does she like watching Young Sheldon? At recess, is she a cop or a robber?” Bet you anything your kid responds, and when he/she does, you’ve got them right where you want them. You can take the conversation anywhere from there.

The Awkward Silence

Join forces with your partner and resolve to say nothing, not a word. Kids can’t hack it. They fill the silence. (Only downside: my son fills it by saying, “Herpoooooooooouuuuuuuuu – don’t ask why or what this even means.”)

The Nuclear Option

To be deployed only in truly desperate situations: “Okay, if you don’t start telling me about your days, we’re not having chocoloate tonight.” This one has never failed — and believe me, I’ve wielded it way more than I should ever admit.

Thank you so much for reading my blog! What do you guys think? Any other tips you have for starting conversations with little dudes? Are your kids chatty at dinner?

I received awesome feedback after posting the last book recommendation. Thank you! Then I came up with an idea. I am a voracious reader with a huge library (pictured above is one of many bookshelves, sigh!) at home. Since I love books so much, I will write weekly book recommendations or small reviews every Thursday. Why? Because I want you to read. And of course head over to your local bookstore and purchase some books.

Today I want to share some of my favorite memoirs…

How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key. I spent an entire weekend clutching this book to my chest. I even read it in the car. Harrison is hilarious but also introspective, repentant and clear-eyed about why his wife ended up cheating on him and how they tried to reconcile, repeatedly. I laughed out loud, while also rethinking all my past relationships. I will read anything he writes from now on.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett: This novel follows light-skinned Black twin sisters who grow up to live in two very different worlds — one white, one Black. I could not get off the couch reading this book and read it past sunset.

The Girls of Summer by Katie Bishop. This escapist thrill is a coming-of-age story meets midlife malaise, in Greece! Who knew that was the perfect combination?! With two timelines in one woman’s life — her teenage summer of love and intrigue in Greece with a much older man who has suspicious friends, and then later as an older woman in a humdrum marriage — the reader is catapulted back and forth between the Greek islands and London, between passion and feeling stuck. My favorite part — aside from the plot, which unfolds in a delicious, heart-pounding way — are the quieter lines about the lives not lived. There’s a soulfulness to the whole story.

Hope by Andrew Ridker. This dark comedy had me laughing out loud in recognition of some of the characters. It follows the Greenspan family in Brookline, Massachusetts, and what happens when the cardiologist dad is forced out of his profession after falsifying blood samples. A perfect read.

Everything All at Once by Steph Catudal. The way Steph writes, even about ordinary things, takes my breath away. But her life story — her brother’s childhood cancer, her father’s early death from lung cancer, and the cancer that comes for her beloved endurance-athlete husband — is incredibly powerful. The details she describes, the slivers of pain, and her inquiry into faith is just different from other memoirs. It’s so real and gratifying.

My son (10 years-old) looked over my shoulder while I wrote this article. “Mom, this is great but you also need a kids book recommendation section! Right on! So here it goes:

My son loves books by David Walliams. The books are for children ages 7-12 and super funny which actually makes my son want to read. Walliams’ books are also great to read aloud to your child (which I still do almost every night!)

Are you ready to meet the worst parents ever? Sure, some parents are embarrassing – but they’re nothing on this lot. These ten tales of the world’s most spectacularly silly mums and deliriously dads will leave you rocking with laughter. Pinch your nose for Peter Pong, the man with the stinkiest feet in the world… and of course, Supermum! (that’s me!)

What books do you recommend? I’d love to hear…

via The New Yorker

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately…” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Or, Life in the Woods

– – – 

I went to the bathroom because I wished to live deliberately, to sit on the toilet while doing the New York Times Spelling Bee puzzle, and see if I could learn the solution, and not, when I came to die—probably one week from now, smothered by a LEGO avalanche—discover that I had not lived. I would have liked to go to the woods instead, but I didn’t have a nanny.

When I wrote these words, I lived alone, in the bathroom, away from any family member, in a house of solitude which I had built myself, by locking the door, with the labor of my hands only, as well as one of my feet, which I used to gently force my child out of the doorway without pinching any fingers.

The mass of men and women lead lives of quiet desperation because they are trying very, very hard to do Gentle Parenting and not yell at their children.

While I am in the bathroom, I discover that I would rather sit on a porcelain seat and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. But if I could have my own velvet cushion, that would be nice, too. Would it be weird to install one on top of the toilet?

I could take a nap in here. Yet to be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a parent who was quite awake. I can tell I don’t look well-rested, because Instagram keeps showing me ads for Botox and facial fillers. We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake by an infinite expectation of the dawn, since we are all out of coffee, and I forgot to put it on the grocery list.

Is it any wonder I forgot? Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your activities number two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand birthday parties every year. Instead of three meals a day, plus two snacks, plus ten emergency snacks, let your kids feed themselves by dragging a chair to the kitchen counter and figuring out how to use the stove.

I love to be alone. I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude on the toilet. We are, for the most part, more lonely when we go out of the bathroom, among our family, than when we stay in our chambers and yell, “CAN YOU HOLD ON A MINUTE, MOM’S HAVING PRIVACY!”

And yet even here, I am not fully alone. You only need to sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the bathroom that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns: the patient spider waiting in the upper corner, the industrious ant toiling near the sink, the other ant near the shower, another ant right behind that one—oh shit, we have an ant infestation.

Never mind them. The universe is wider than our views of it, obviously, since we are staring at the shower curtain, and according to Facebook (which we checked after getting stuck on the Spelling Bee puzzle) our friends Mike and Caroline are in Santorini again living the life. Oh, all those food and beach pics (damn legs and feet in the sand) while I am still sitting on the toilet.

It matters not how much time will pass before my next vacation. Time is but the stream I go swimming in. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains, kind of like the contents of this toilet, which I’m just now remembering has been clogged since earlier today when my child did an experiment by testing how many toilet rolls can be stuffed in before it wouldn’t flush.

If life emits a fragrance like… let’s say flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more starry, more immortal, that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. I just squashed a whole bunch of ants with a tissue, and it felt amazing.

After approximately six and a half minutes, I left the bathroom for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, but more likely, it seemed to me that the child/dog fight going on outside the door had escalated to a dangerous point.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of one’s dreams, I mean the bathroom, and endeavors to live the life which she has imagined, I mean a life where she can just sit and look at her toenails for a minute, she will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. She will put some things behind her, like her child, who is trying to outrun the dog and make him a comfortable bed in your newly washed bedsheets, and she will live with the license of a higher order of beings, I mean people without children who can go live in a house in the woods, by the beach, travel whenever more easily if they want to, or just have peace and quiet for, like, five seconds—I SAID MOM IS COMING!

With this being said, I wish you all a Happy New Year. With kids, without kids, whatever makes you happy. I enjoy a little quiet time in the toilet here and there when things get too much. Or travel to see my parents which is the ultimate “kid-break” – just minus the beach. I wish you all your very own hiding place. I think we all need one. I SAID MOM IS COMING! LEAVE THOSE NEW YEAR ROCKETS UNTOUCHED!